For Arvada kids, nutrition's in the bag

Food bank assembles weekly food packages to ensure needy get fed

By Myung Oak Kim, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published November 26, 2007 at 12:30 a.m.

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Photo by Barry Gutierrez © The Rocky

Eight-year-old Janae Cashman heads home with a bag of food she received through the Arvada Community Food Bank's Feeding the Future Program. Every Friday during the school year, the food bank distributes food at four elementary schools.

Photo by Barry Gutierrez © The Rocky

Angel Troncosa, 5, wasted no time biting into a cookie that was in the bag of food she took home earlier this month from Lawrence Elementary School in Arvada.

The skinny boy with tousled strawberry blond hair and ivory skin grabbed his jacket and Hot Wheels backpack and headed for the door.

It was about 2:30 p.m. on Nov. 16 at Lawrence Elementary, a pre-kindergarten-to sixth-grade school tucked in a modest residential neighborhood near 52nd Avenue and Wadsworth Boulevard in Arvada.

The second-grader leaned over a plastic box and looked for a tied, plastic shopping bag with his name on a sticker.

He picked up the sack, stuffed it into his backpack and left.

Nine of his classmates - almost half the students in Room 113 - also took bags home. In fact, one-third of the entire school got these bags.

This is what was inside:

25-ounce can of spaghetti sauce

1-pound bag of spaghetti

15-ounce can of sliced pears

Two Kellogg Special K protein snack bars

Pack of cheese crackers

Bag of hot chocolate

Pack of microwave popcorn

Pack of Lorna Doone shortbread cookies

The food will keep many of these kids' bellies from rumbling over the weekend.

In Arvada, the town with the highest concentration of homeless students in Jefferson County, hundreds of children lack basic necessities such as winter coats and many don't get a nutritious meal on the weekends. That's why the Arvada Community Food Bank started the backpack program.

Begun in October 2006, the program now operates at four elementary schools and has a waiting list. Every Friday during the school year, about 600 children at Lawrence, Allendale, Foster and Russell elementaries take home the bags, designed to provide two breakfasts, two lunches and snacks.

At these schools, at least one student, and sometimes up to 10, in every class gets the food, said Kathy Underhill, the food bank's executive director. Parents sign a form requesting the food.

Underhill gets the food, at a cost of $2 per bag, from donations, wholesale distributors and other food banks.

Each Thursday, teams of volunteers assemble the packs in the school cafeterias or libraries. They're distributed to the classrooms and given to the kids before dismissal on Fridays.

About 75 percent of the students at Lawrence are poor, and about 15 percent are homeless, said Principal Beth Morganfield. The school, which is about 66 percent Caucasian, has grown by almost 100 students in the past two years.

Debby Porreco, a retired orthopedic technician and Rotary Club volunteer from Arvada, coordinates the Lawrence program.

A couple weeks ago, she was delivering a bin of food bags to a kindergarten class when a little boy ran up to her.

"Is that the food?" the boy asked Porreco.

"Yeah," she responded.

"Is my name on one of those bags?" he asked.

"Yeah."

The boy hugged Porreco and said, "Oh, thank you!"

Porreco said she was stunned by the boy's emotion. Before working with the program, she had only a vague idea that their were children like the young boy who needed food.

"But when you actually understand that there are kids in our schools - two or three miles away - that are hungry, it will just stagger you," she said.

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